When I woke up, I once again saw the face of Clemente. He asked if I was feeling better, if I had had something to eat. I didn’t know where I was, who I was, what day it was. I had a pounding headache and the room reeked of shit and vomit. ‘Don’t you remember me, Señor Mandinga?’ said the bald man and I told him I didn’t remember him and asked why he was calling me Mandinga.
‘Because that’s the name you gave me when you introduced yourself,’ said Clemente. Then he said that it was normal that I couldn’t remember anything and that I should be happy because that meant I had come back to reality. Then the questions started again: he wanted to know my age, my parents’ names, where I had been born and whether there ever existed a place named Pata de Puerco.
‘Of course there was a place called Pata de Puerco.’
‘Ah, I see. Are you sure you’re not referring to a novel that you wrote?’
‘I’m sure.’
‘And the name Ulises Correa means nothing to you?’
‘Of course it means something to me.’
And this was the truth. From the moment I came round, I heard a cacophony of voices, shrieking voices that would not even let me think. Yet even in this world of confusion I recognised the voice of Ulises, just as I recognised the voices of Judío Alemán and Judío the butcher; I could clearly see the faces of Mozambique the murderer and Mozambique the old beggar in El Cobre; my real home, I knew, was in Lawton, though sometimes I was not even sure of this, because I saw faces I had never seen before, faces I might have seen once in a dream. The truth is, I no longer knew who I was.
‘Let me tell you something, Commissioner Clemente. There is only one reality: the reality that makes sense inside our heads. In there, if you don’t understand something, you ask questions and you keep an open mind since the answers often lead us to places we don’t want to go. If your lack of experience means you cannot see that places like Pata de Puerco exist, that they’re real, there’s really no point in us continuing this conversation. If I am crazy, you are crazier still for dragging me back to this reality we live in, since the world we call real is the craziest of all. The sane are the real madmen, and the madmen are the sane, Señor Clemente.’
This I said to the Imperial Wizard of the Cuban branch of the Ku Klux Klan. Then I suggested he turn on the television so he could see whether what I had just said was true. Clemente stared at me with black eyes like bottomless wells and scrawled something in his red notebook. Only the howls of pain from who knows where reminded me where I was. A cracked voice rumbled inside me and then exploded like a grenade. It was the voice of Clemente ordering that I be given more electroshock. The gorillas stepped back into the room and reattached the electrodes. In the days that followed there were more shocks, more and more of them. Until one day I no longer even knew whether I existed or whether, as Clemente said, I was just another character, a figment of my own imagination.
Since then, I amuse myself in this dark cell telling stories to my faithful friends: the four walls, the roaches and the rats. What else is there to do? There are times when I feel certain that night has fallen, my mind stirs and I consider myself a prophet. But after a few seconds I fall back into this dark chasm of not knowing who I am. The images in my head are blurred and confused, as though with every hundred metres the world shifts and changes, and that’s when the tremors start, the terrible earthquake that shakes the ground beneath my feet that will not let me live.
Sometimes, after the crisis has passed, I sit here quietly. I escape from my cell and soar high above everything, up to the peaks of the Sierra, from where I see dragonflies, the vast green expanse of the meadows and the rice fields. I am one of Evaristo’s kites, floating in the sheltering blue sky. Down below everyone is gathered round the red flame tree waiting for me, ready to begin the festivities, to recite poems: Melecio with María, José and his friend Oscar and their wives Betina and Malena, Juanita the wise-woman with her Angolan orchids, El Judío, Kid Chocolate, the
wijes
, El Mozambique and Ester. In these brief moments, I am happy. Until I open my eyes again and find myself still strapped to this bed, in this darkness that smells of dog piss and death and despair. I hope that one day I will be able to find absolute silence, but the voices in my head never leave me, nor does the darkness.
You have to believe me when I say that it is not pessimism I wanted to convey in telling you my story. I wanted to take you back to the roots of a man and the story that created him. If this is an act of a madman, then I am proud to accept the name. I don’t want to be said, like those white-shirted henchmen, to be unable to see beyond the universe that man himself has created. Leave me to be mad like the artists and the poets. Mad like Nature herself. Like those same people, those same gods who invented love. Having said that, and with great regret, I won’t deny that I have seriously considered swallowing a clock. That’s the truth. Other times I think about swallowing a fistful of nails, or maybe one of these days I’ll simply hang myself. But not today. Today you have given me your time, lent me your ears and for that I am extremely grateful.
So for the moment, those bastards will have to kill me with electroshocks because I won’t give them the satisfaction of killing myself. But before that happens, I want to thank you for having kept me company all this time. Thank you for listening to this story of a small corner of a sweeping plain with a few scattered shacks between the Sierra Maestra mountains of Santiago de Cuba and the copper mines of El Cobre, where the breeze blows and night enfolds us with its chill breath and the purple cloak that curls about the streets. Thank you for walking with me along the dirt roads of Pata de Puerco, this village of mud, fictional or real. This forgotten place where some day I will return for ever. My name is Oscar Mandinga. Don’t forget it.
I would like to thank a number of people for their invaluable contributions to the creation of this book: José Adrian Vitier, Nick Caistor, Rupert Rohan, Olga Marta, Marina Asenjo, Elizabeth Woabank, Greg Heinimann, Laura Brooke and all the members of my family at Bloomsbury. I would particularly like to thank Felicity Bryan and Bill Swainson who, from the start, have had faith in me, and also Frank Wynne for his magnificent translation and for the crucial contribution he has made to the final version of the text.
Carlos Acosta was born in Havana in 1973 and trained at the National Ballet School of Cuba. He has been a principal at the English National Ballet, the Houston Ballet, the American Ballet Theatre and the Royal Ballet, and has danced as a guest artist all over the world, winning numerous international awards. He is the author of the autobiography
No Way Home: A Cuban Dancer’s Story
and made his film debut in
New York, I Love You
.
Frank Wynne has won four major prizes for his translations, including the 2002 IMPAC for
Atomised
by Michel Houellebecq, the 2005 Independent Foreign Fiction Prize and the 2008 Scott Moncrieff Prize. He is also the translator of Tomás Eloy Martínez’s
Purgatory
and won the 2012 Premio Valle Inclán prize for his translation of Marcelo Figueras’s
Kamchatka
.
No Way Home: A Cuban Dancer’s Story
Copyright © 2013 Carlos Acosta
English translation copyright © 2013 Frank Wynne
All rights reserved. You may not copy, distribute, transmit, reproduce, or otherwise make available this publication (or any part of it) in any form, or by any means (including without limitation electronic, digital, optical, mechanical, photocopying, printing, recording, or otherwise), without the prior written permission of the publisher. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. For information, write to Bloomsbury USA, 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018.
This is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real places are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places, and events are products of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to actual events or places or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Published by Bloomsbury USA, New York
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
Acosta, Carlos, 1973–
Pig's foot : a novel / Carlos Acosta ; Translated from the Spanish by Frank Wynne.
pages cm
Translated from the Spanish by Frank Wynne.
eISBN: 978-1-62040-081-2
1. Acosta, Carlos, 1973 — Translations into English. I. Wynne, Frank, translator. II. Title.
PQ7442.A36P5413 2014
863'.7—dc23
2013035126
First published in Great Britain in 2013
First U.S. Edition 2014
This electronic edition published in January 2014
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